How to Create a Work Center Group in EDGEBIC

Creating a machine pool in EDGEBIC by User Solutions takes four steps: create the group, choose its selection strategy, add member machines with their speed factors, and bind a routing step to the pool instead of a machine. Everything after that happens on the next scheduling run, when the engine shops the pool and books the best member. This walkthrough covers each screen and each field.

If you are still deciding whether a pool is the right structure at all, start with work center groups explained, which compares pools against alternates, instances, and departments, or with the plain definition of a work center group. Everything below happens inside EDGEBIC.

Before You Start

Work centers themselves are set up on the Workcenter tab, and the complete EDGEBIC guide covers the master data sequence if you are building a plant from scratch.

Step 1: Create the Group

Open the Workcenter tab from the main navigation. It holds three inner tabs: Workcenters, Workcenter Groups, and Resource Calendar. Select Workcenter Groups and click Group in the toolbar to open the Add Work Center Group dialog.

Name the pool after the capability, in capitals: MILLING, WELDING, PAINT-LINE. That name lands on routing steps as a badge, so short and unmistakable beats descriptive. Save, and the group appears in the list with a member count of zero. A group with no active members cannot be scheduled, so add members next.

To change the name, code, strategy, or active flag later, double-click the group in the list and the same dialog reopens.

Step 2: Choose the Selection Strategy

The strategy decides which member runs a step when more than one could. Three options ship, and the help text under the combo box explains the selected one:

EarliestCompletion is the default and matches what most planners expect. It is also the standard behavior of resource groups in mainstream planning systems, so it travels well when a supervisor moves between tools. The mechanics of each strategy, with arithmetic, are in how EDGEBIC picks the best machine in a pool.

Step 3: Add Members and Set Their Knobs

With the group selected, click Add / Remove Members. The picker lists every work center with a checkbox. Check the machines that belong to the pool and click OK. A machine may belong to several groups at once, and rows already used elsewhere carry a note rather than being hidden.

The members now appear in the members grid. Edit each row directly in the grid, then click Apply on that row:

Two habits keep pools honest. First, leave factors at 1.0 for homogeneous pools and set them only where machines genuinely differ in speed for this class of work. Second, flag exactly one Primary when you plan to use PrimaryFirst. Without a primary flag, the lowest priority number acts as the primary, and explicit beats implicit when a supervisor is reading the grid at 6am.

Step 4: Bind a Routing Step to the Pool

Open the BOR tab and select the routing you want to edit. On the step's row, click the select work center button next to the work center field. The selection popup opens with three radio buttons: Workcenter, Product, and Work Center Group.

Choose Work Center Group. The list switches to active groups that have at least one active member, and hovering a group previews its members with their factors. Pick the group and click Confirm. The step now shows a pool badge with the group name and member count instead of a machine name.

Two consequences are worth knowing at this moment:

• Binding to a group replaces any manually configured alternate work centers on that step. The group is the alternate list.
• A group-bound step cannot also be a parallel step in this release, and a material step (one pointing at a product) cannot be group bound.

The same fields are available in the graphical routing designer, which shows the pool badge on bound nodes and blocks the alternate and parallel dialogs on them. If you build routings visually, the designer tour covers the node properties panel.

Step 5: Run the Schedule and Check the Result

Nothing has moved yet. Run Drive Schedule, then read what changed:

After the run, open the Resource Calendar inner tab to see capacity against load for the pool over a date window. Each group row is the live sum of its members for that window. A machine belonging to two pools appears under both, and those rows are overlapping views of the same hours rather than extra capacity.

A Concrete First Pool

Here is the documented worked example, small enough to build in ten minutes. Group MILLING, strategy EarliestCompletion, two members: CNC-Mill-1 at factor 1.0 flagged Primary with priority 1, and CNC-Mill-2 at factor 1.25 with priority 2. Both run a Day Shift of 08:00 to 16:00 with one instance each.

A routing step for a 20-piece job has base hours of 0.5 per unit and 0.5 hours of setup. The pool arithmetic:

With both mills free on Monday morning, CNC-Mill-1 finishes Tuesday 10:30 against CNC-Mill-2's Tuesday 13:00, so the faster machine wins. With CNC-Mill-1 booked solid until Wednesday, its projected completion slides to Thursday 10:30 while CNC-Mill-2 still finishes Tuesday 13:00, so the slower machine wins. That reversal is not a bug, it is capacity-aware pooling doing its job.

Where to Go Next

Once the first pool works, the useful next reads are how the member gets picked for the strategy mechanics and re-shopping behavior, and work center group mistakes for the configuration traps that produce confusing schedules. If your pooled operations also need a certified person standing at the machine, operator and skill scheduling is the second constraint dimension, and the two compose on one routing step. For how pooling fits the wider picture of production scheduling, the complete guide has the full pipeline.

Bringing machine data over from an existing system? Pools are built on work centers, and work centers arrive through import masks like every other master data table.